For quite some time, the Royal Danish Academy has focused on exploring new ways to reduce carbon emissions in building projects, to refurbish and restore buildings rather than build new ones, and to create designs that last. The focal point of the Planetary Boundaries – Rethinking Architecture and Design exhibition is to perceive the world from a fresh perspective, seeking an approach to architecture and design disciplines that revolves around planetary well-being and the state of the global environment.

Events of recent years have manifested what science has been forecasting for a long time: Climate change has become an obvious, red-hot truth. The climate is changing, and this is affecting the planet. The impact of human activity on the planet’s ecosystem can now be clearly felt in the state of the global environment. Climate change is not an eventuality; it is already here.

Planetary Boundaries is a theory that is used to describe our global limitations. It examines what the Earth can endure before irreversible imbalances are created in our ecosystem. It is a theory focused on the planet’s needs rather than our needs: What does the planet need in the struggle for its own survival and the survival of natural environments and human beings?

Architecture and design – along with agriculture, transportation and other industries – have contributed to overconsumption of the world’s resources. This is why the Royal Danish Academy is rethinking how the architecture and design of the future can co-exist with a balanced planet. We are intently focused on making the requisite transition, because durable solutions are strongly linked to good architectural and design solutions.

This exhibition allows you to experience 25 selected projects which – from an academic architectural or design perspective – ponder the potential for innovative design, building materials and types of dwellings with wide-ranging aesthetics – but a tiny planetary footprint. There are experiments, specific proposals and ambitious explorations of how we need to transition, and rethink our conventional view of architecture and design.

Planetary Boundaries originates from the Stockholm Resilience Centre at the University of Stockholm. The centre measures the planetary boundaries that have been exceeded and the remaining scope for manoeuvre on the basis of nine parameters, all of which provide a situational report on the state of the global environment. Planetary Boundaries has been used by the UN, the EU and other bodies in drawing up climate policies, and it serves as the foundation for a host of other climate-related theories.

Each of the 25 projects exhibited considers one or more of the nine parameters.

This pictorial confronts the urgent need to shift design practices in response to the past and ongoing destruction of habitat structures and the resulting losses of biodiversity. To do this, it illustrates the first iteration of I.N.S.E.C.T. Wall Twin: an architectural installation that endeavours to support coexistence between local insects, fungi, and humans. The installation is an outcome of the workshop “Interspecies Exploration by Bio- Digital Manufacturing Technologies” during the first part of the I.N.S.E.C.T. Summer Camp (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, August 2022). The 9-day workshop brought together a group of four organisers and nine selected participants to engage with the challenges of designing for and with other living beings. Aiming to develop novel approaches to creating urban habitat structures, the workshop involved parametric design, clay 3D printing, mycelium-based composites, and freeform crocheting. We explored questions of interspecies design by prototyping objects iteratively while conversing and reflecting. Our discussion lists the insights we gained from this process of collaborative and critical making. We offer suggestions for involving a range of human and nonhuman stakeholders in design; reflect on practical and ethical questions when working with living materials; identify challenges of foregrounding nonhuman needs while dealing with technical or logistical constraints; and outline ways to approach the complexity of intervening in ecosystems. These considerations may help inform the future work of designers who want to integrate the perspectives of multiple species into their designs. As a living laboratory undergoing continual monitoring, I.N.S.E.C.T. Wall Twin provides a useful foundation for developing further iterations and a community that exceeds the duration of the camp. 

We present the two-part I.N.S.E.C.T Summercamp 2022, which aimed to connect designers and researchers who are invested in multispecies perspectives for design. Co-creation was used as a strategy for organizational purposes and co-creation methods played a major role to promote innovative outcomes and strengthen the ownership of solutions and trust among participants. The two parts of the summercamp followed different strategies for co-creating the facilitation and organization of the camp experiences and led, to different degrees, to co-creation that continues beyond the duration of the camp. We apply Bentzen’s conceptual framework, “a continuity perspective on co-creation” as a means to map, describe, and reflect upon the levels, phases, and the roles of involvement of organizers, and human and non-human participants (2022). Part 1 (Case 1) was organized with the focus on designing-for, whereas Part 2 (Case 2) centered around ways of being-with other living beings, i.e., insects. Through this case study, we present and discuss a program and two formats that are based on human co-creation and that allow us to engage with our own and other species more deeply. Thereby we strengthen the field of multispecies design and respond to one of the biggest challenges designers face today: integrating post-anthropocentric perspectives into their work.

In this workshop, we will bring together designers and researchers working with, for, and around nature to facilitate a transversal conversation around how to engage nature as a key part of our design processes. By deliberately adopting an open and ambiguous idea of what we mean by ‘nature’, we hope to embrace diverse kinds of more-than-human entanglements, including (but not only): farming, companion species, microbiomes, body ecologies, forests and other large-scale landscapes (e.g. oceans), or cohabitation in houses. We argue for the importance of taking such an open-ended perspective, to embrace all possible relevant vectors of nature-related design: multispecies, cohabitation, posthuman sustainability, posthuman care… The workshop is set as a as a platform for shared methodological reflection through the lenses of a more-than-human approach to posthuman research. It will primarily be in-person, given our aim of bringing researchers together and co-experiencing each others’ methods and techniques.

Biodesign is considered as a new industrial paradigm holding the potential to fundamentally change the way we produce and impact the environment through e.g., the building practice. Within biodesign the living is predominantly described as providing resources that can be used and programmed. The livingness is reduced to being a material quality in design that is compelling due to its dynamic, performative, and temporal dimensions. Thereby, the methods of specification and representation are often fundamentally anthropocentric and create hierarchical relationships. At the same time, biodesign holds the potential to re-think nature culture relationships and challenge these hierarchies, especially when it comes to envisioning and designing living environments that are shared with others e.g., insects and plants. Therefore, we need to expand conceptions of biodesign beyond how we currently work with living matter, materials, and organisms. This research aims to investigate emerging practices, environments, and mindsets that reach a more inclusive approach to biodesign. Therefore, we conducted interviews with selected practitioners who developed an experimental practice or mindset as a result of their “reflective conversation with the materials of a situation” and their species-specific demands. This paper contributes to the biodesign discourse and provides incentives about how the built environment can respond to, and develop together with other living organisms. We want to challenge biodesign as merely a new industrial variety and material practice towards an activity that includes and gives space to the agency of living organisms and their creative potential to design our lives as much as we design theirs. Building on the interview data, we argue for a “fluid design landscape”, as a more responsive methodological framework that encourages biodesigners to integrate a larger array of methods and environments into their practices, while remaining open to exploring ways of co-creating and co-evolving with the living world.

The emergence of biodesign opens new ways for textile design and production processes by e.g. using living organisms directly for growing or dyeing textiles. Researchers and designers who engage in such practices often describe their processes as a collaboration with the living. Since maintenance or acts of caring are often fundamental for a successful result, supportive environments for the living are created. However, most of the organisms are only used to carry out a specific task given by the designers’ intention, e.g., excreting pigments to dye a piece of silk, and are killed after the successful completion of the “collaborative” project, which is one of the reasons why the anthropocentric perspective remains an integral part of the textile design process.

This research aims to challenge the anthropocentrism inherent in textile design methodologies. Drawing from the work of Donna Haraway, in this exploratory paper, I advocate for exploring more than anthropocentric and multispecies perspectives to textile design by understanding the textile design practice as a way of being-with and staying-with, rather than as a solution-driven practice. Therefore, I revisit and reflect on three stories that derived from encounters between humans and insects in shared textile contexts. The stories on multispecies cohabitation resulted from the autobiographic research ‘Textile Farming’. Weaving connections between contemporary approaches to design, this paper proposes a conceptual framework of the levels that designers can engage with the living e.g., designing with, for, or together with living organisms up to living-with and becoming-with. I found these reflections to offer valuable perspectives to reflect on, analyze, and discuss processes in which living organisms play a role. Consequently, the paper contributes to reflective practice and opens up the textile design practice towards open-ended events as a more than anthropocentric approach to designing textiles.